Is this a dead end page?

[weegillis]

If all my external links are set up like this,

<a target="_blank" onclick='windowOpen("http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/axs/ax.pl?http://yourdomain.com/"); return false;' href="http://www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/axs/ax.pl?http://yourdomain.com" title="Opens link in new window">Link Text</a>

does this page pass any PR, or is it a dead end?

Under the above conditions, will all the PR be passed through the LINK element in the HEAD?

<link rel="supplier" href="http://www.example.com/" />

[mccreath]

What does your ax.pl file do?

I presume it redirects to the specified URL. How does it do the redirect?

If its a 301 redirect then most of the link juice should get passed.

[weegillis]

AX. PL is the AXS 2.0 Tracking System, in this case as it is applied to outbound links (to log links followed out of the site). Yes, it immediately redirects to the specified URL, no conditions or directives applied.

[wige]

But is that a 301 redirect, a 302, or something else? As this is an interstitial, at best you will only pass partial PR, since Google has confirmed that all redirects do consume some PR (301s just consume the least).

As far as the link tag in the head, as far as I know, since the tag is meaningless to human visitors, it would not be considered by the search engines.

[weegillis]

Correction... Managed to unearth this as part of a conditional where $mode eq 'redir':

HTTP/1.0 301 Moved

So there is a status, as you all suspected.

Segue:
How can something be moved when it's not on 'mydomain'? Moved from where to where?


Along the lines of OP, what of the cgi-bin folder in the path? If it is restricted in robots.txt will a robot be able to follow a link even as far as the redirect?

[mccreath]

301 actually stands for "Moved Permanently". You'r using a go-between file to track the click. It then has to tell browsers and search engines where the real file is. So it uses a 30X code which redirects them.

Interesting thought on the cgi-bin and robots.txt blocking. Maybe worth a thread of its own.

If you want to pass on link juice, you could make the href use the direct URL. As most human visitors will trigger the onclick you will still get your tracking, while search engines will get the true url.

[wige]

If the folder containing your interstitial page is blocked by robots.txt, it will pass absolutely no benefit to the destination page. I know this for two reasons - one, most search engines use this technique to keep their results from being crawled or being able to pass PR, and two, Google recommended this technique specifically as an alternative to nofollow links. I think they called it a blind-interstitial or a blind-redirect. Not sure, it was a while back.

[weegillis]

@wige: As I expected. So if this is the case, and there are no links leading out that are not redirected, is link juice passed only to internal links? Or is it a dead end?

@mccreath: Good point about the leaving the href attribute natural, without the redirect. While we might miss the few clicks of non-javascript enabled users, we would definitely be opening the gate for link juice to flow out from the page, solving what I suspect is a dead end.